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Friday, August 15, 2014

Guess what I'm doing.

Yeah, you guessed right. The backhand. I told you I was obsessive. The good news is that I have figured a few things out and I think they make sense. Now if I can just explain it and more importantly do it right myself.

First, I'm going to start with a fine meal of crow. I had blogged that I was pretty unhappy with the suggestion for beginners to learn to drive from a stand still. You can read my min-rant here if you like. I should have probably been a bit more thoughtful on this point. I was wrong.

After countless hours or rebuilding my form, I think that a very important key to fixing form is timing. Timing is a very big part of the magic. It's very hard to learn timing because so much is happening in about a tenth of a second. I won't get into all the things just yet, but I will say that learning timing without the x-step seems to be much easier. It's hard enough to avoid common form issues (rounding, over opening, strong arming) when you're moving slow, and almost impossible to fix them when you're moving faster.

Now what exactly is a stand still? Feet planted in cement? No. And unfortunately, that's what I thought it meant: plant both feet on the ground like a statue and try to generate some linear forward motion. A stand still drive means no x-step, but you'll want to lift your plant foot off the ground during the back-swing and drive off the ball of your back foot. It will help get things moving forward.

Crow eaten. It tasted like chicken.

Next, I'm done calling it a reach-back. It's now a back-swing. Reaching back, bending at the waist and getting my weight too far over my back foot took some serious work to undo. So it's a back-swing and there's no REACHING.

Okay, so let's talk for a second about the core mechanism that we're using to throw a backhand. What accelerates the disc? I thought for the better part of a year that it was just a big back-swing and you try to get your hand going really fast. Fast hands = fast disc, or so I assumed. It makes sense, especially when you watch the pros who can throw a country mile and they are definitely moving really fast.

That's wrong.

There's a mechanism in the backhand that can do nearly all the real work of accelerating the disc:

It's pulling around the front of the disc, from hand on the outside of the disc (when it's in front of your right pec) to the other side of the disc (when your arm is fully extended forward), where the disc will rip from your grip.

Check out where Will holds the disc to... That's about the 5:00 position!

That little bit of magic is absurdly powerful and it means that you don't have to throw the disc hard. What you do, at the simplest level, is hold onto the disc long enough to take advantage of this double pendulum (your arm) that's about to swing open with the weight of your body generating your forward momentum. The longer you hold on, the faster that thing rockets out.

"But the pros are throwing the disc really hard and really fast from the back of their back-swing!"

Yes, AND, they are very good. They can come into correct positions with a ton of hand speed and stay in the exact right spots, either because they've practiced everyday for the better part of their lives or because they are just lucky to have absurd genetics. But mostly it's practice.

Either way, they're still using this mechanism of pulling around the disc to accelerate it. The big secret to this thing is that you have to keep your hand on the outside of the disc as late as possible. Why? Because the more distance that your hand has to travel around the front of the disc, the faster it will go to get to the release point and because from this position you can leverage the holy poop out of the disc.

The longer the distance your hand is forced to travel to the release point, the faster it will have to accelerate to get there and the more severe of an angle you can lever the outside edge.

Who cares if you bring 50mph of hand speed into your chest if you lose half of that distance around the disc and only accelerate to 60mph? Come into your chest with 20 mph of hand speed and accelerate to 100mph because you're using the magic.

When you lose that distance, your hand doesn't need to accelerate as much to travel a shorter distance to the release point.

If you leave the hand on the outside of the disc, you'll pull your hand around the disc at ridiculous speeds. Easily fast enough to throw a putter 200' without using hips or a back-swing. That's how much work this thing does.

Dragging the disc by the nose.

Above is an example from a r/discgolf request that I helped with recently. I pointed out that "where your hand is in that screen cap, there's no way to accelerate your hand to the hit from there. If you leave it on the outside, as you get closer to the hit point, your hand will have to accelerate greatly to cover that distance to get around the disc."

I'm not picking on this nice fella, I just see this issue all the time in form requests. I saw it in my own form, that's for sure. It is very easy to do incorrectly but happily it's not that hard to fix. The key for me is to practice guiding the disc in my back-swing towards my right arm pit on a straight line until the disc is in front of my right pec, hand still on the outside, elbow driving forward. To practice this, you will need a very technical piece of hardware: a wall.

Can you make that happen?! Good.

Guide that disc into the right pec while standing close enough to a wall that you can see if you're guiding it in a straight line. Another nice thing this drill does, is show you if you're over-opening and how you need to stand oriented to your release point, to pull the disc on a straight line.

The throwing arm shoulder has a very nasty habit of pulling your hand forward on the disc. Because your arm is bent at the elbow, while the disc is pulled into your chest, if you turn your shoulders to face a bit forward, your hand moves forward. Try it and watch in dismay as it happens. If your shoulders are starting to turn towards the target before the disc is extended out front, then you're over-opening.

This is a big part of what timing is all about. It's getting your body into the right places at the right time.

The right place for your hand is on the outside of the disc, in front of your right pec while your shoulders are making a line at your target, and your elbow pointing out front. From that point, the momentum of your arm moving forward is going to take care of the rest, so long as you hold on to the disc. Looking perpendicular to the line you're throwing on helps quite a bit to fix over-opening. After you release the disc, your shoulders will be coming through, and that'll pull your head forward.

So when exactly do you get to start throwing harder?

You do not throw hard with your arm.

You will start to generate more forward momentum with your hips. Drive harder from your back foot into your plant. Back swing keeps the disc on a straight line into the right pec. You will focus on a clean rip that levers out between your thumb and index-knuckle. You will stay like a loose whip that glides through these important angles and transfers all that momentum into pulling your hand around that disc. You will stay upright and braced against the plant foot. You will delay the back-swing a bit later, so that the whole system has to happen a bit faster.

The same mechanism is still in action, so you have to protect that important space around the front of the disc, because if you lose that space, you lose the magic.

I know this seems counter intuitive, but watch Simon Lizotte drive:

Hand on the outside.
Elbow out front.
Shoulders closed.
Braced hard against the plant foot.

I try to watch this footage critically and find those magic spots. The best of the top pros all have some unique qualities, but the commonality is what we're after.

Hand on the outside.
Elbow WAY out front.
Shoulders closed
Braced hard against the plant foot.

Extending that elbow out front, while keeping your hand on the outside, shoulders aimed down the line is what we're shooting for. Take everything else out until you can protect those core functions. You'll be shocked at what kind of accuracy and distance you can get with just those things. Adding in x-steps and little more "heat" into the system is fine, so long as you are still protecting the magic.

Good luck friends, and happy throwing and hopefully I can move on from the last 10 weeks of retooling and learning how to be comfortable with my new technique. It's showing big improvements in my game, but not without some growing pains. Throwing hyzer and ranging is tough right now. I've been having to take some off of shots that I am now throwing long and I'm throwing mids on shots that had previously been drivers, so there's going to be some rough patches.

Fantastic article. I don't back hand much because of terrible form / distance. I can forehand 400 consistently, but can't backhand a driver to save my life. I will give this a try and see if I can add backhand drives into my hand.

No, it looks like you're getting a great hit with a more of a Swedish style that derives quite a bit of power from less elbow and more leverage. Tomas Ekstrom & Feldberg are the 2 big names that throw with a similar style.

Okay, well 350' tells me that you're probably stuck a bit between styles. I think you should either commit to the bent elbow or the swedish style and incorporate all the movements that come with each. I can tell that you're able to pull around the disc, so the next thing (assuming you went bent-elbow) would be to lead with the elbow further out front, which will increase your ability to leverage.

Great article! I did have one to one driving session with Blake T, Andrew Gregos and Zachery Jansen and all three said the similar thing as you said above. My main problem is too early shoulder opening which result in half hit (half snap) that gets my disc (MVP Inertia, Tesla) up to 280 to 300 feet under competitive conditions (I got 50th place in Grandmaster in recent Pro Worlds in Portland). Sometimes I focus on "slow in, fast out" and delayed shoulder opening and did feel stronger snap and disc indeed flies to around 320' or so. I would love to hit comfy 350' regularly which I believe very much doable for me. I did the "wall" drill but not much but will do more of this this time. It is true when one finds easier distance via better form, then will need to work on accuracy and ranging, that is nature of this game :) Can you do some video reviews? Jamie

I would be happy to do a video review, but honestly, the Form/Analysis forum at DGCourseReview.com is the best place to get a wide array of feedback. There's quite a few guys who helped me to figure this stuff out over there.

I've been trying to fix my backhand for thirty years and can't believe I hadn't found this until now. Fascinating stuff. The old thinking was always to reach back far and pull the disc as fast as you could along a straight line. That makes a lot of sense intuitively, but the modern thinking that emphasizes the motion from the chest forward is much closer to how players throw so far these days.

After a promising start (ROY 1985), I developed the backhand yips, also known as a tendency to yank that I couldn't get out of my head. Eventually I switched to sidearm and did okay that way. Most of my technical issues stem from rotating my shoulders too early and/or too much. Your blog makes it clear that the shoulders are not a primary provider of impetus. It's really the acceleration of the forearm lever (I think of the forearm as a line segment, and we want to maximize the acceleration of its endpoint - the hand - using the elbow as a hinge). While practicing - over decades - it became clear to me that getting the elbow out in front is important, but now I know it's crucial. You can still throw well with a sweeping, arcing, rotational type of throw, but the timing is really tricky and you'll need a fast and well-timed snap.

For folks like me who tend to pull their throws due to stiffness and overrotation, I've found what I think is a good drill: Set up about fifteen feet behind a bush or tree that is in front and to the right. Line up your body so that the edge is right in front of you. Throw hyzer shots that pass the bush on the left. To do that, you need to get the disc loaded so that you can snap it out toward the left (it feels left, but is actually straight). In a way, it's practicing strong pushes. Helps fight the tendency I have to use rotation to throw. My big mistakes are still shoulder rotation - too early or too much. Trying to think of it as the shoulders don't lead, they follow.

Thanks Conrad! I am glad it helped get some thoughts clicking, I know that all this information has been out there, it was just spread out all over the place and I wanted to try to get it together in a way that makes the most sense possible.

In my case, to fix the over-opening of the shoulders came from picking things to look at perpendicular to the line I was throwing on. For a few days, even that wouldn't get it done (I'd just be looking back, while over-opening). I had to video myself and review and then try to make adjustments... it's a very difficult problem to overcome.

Eventually I started to feel what forward elbow extension felt like without over-opening and it slowly started getting better.

Interesting point about pros being able to pull amazingly hard from the early backswing. As seen here ( http://youtu.be/3yKRqwcffOE?t=13m18s ), Lizotte is putting tremendous amounts of acceleration from the beginning to get the disc to deform like that.

I hope that some day you and I and all of us in search of The Form will be able to do that and still get the timing and everything right!

Thank you for going through the trouble to write this blog and thanks to you i now have ventured into the rabbit hole...I've been playing for about 10 months and i can drive 350-375 on average but am wanting/needing to add that extra 50'...please take a look at my video and criticize! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H29RRpm-TVA&app=desktop

Today I learned what "snap" feels like. Having tried most every other suggestion on this site, I finally cowboyed-up to do the "uncool" Beto drill, and I crushed some putters. Now if I can only translate this to my full throw...